@sir What alternatives could you suggest? IRC is text-only and primitive and Matrix is slow and I haven't yet seen a client with decent UX. I haven't used Zulip or Mattermost yet, I've only heard of them.

@sir@slp Of course it's a feature - unless you want to chat with someone who isn't a complete and total developer nerd like me or you and wants standard contemporary features like automatic image uploads, conversation threads, channel history, or if you want to build a community of non-technological people around your software. At that point, I observed that people prefer to leave rather than stay on IRC.

With IRC trollspamming finally endemic on many FOSS-associated networks & subsequent need for nick registration, the very low barrier-to-entry of IRC which was a trade-off against more intricate feature sets is gone.